Purchasing behavior of consumers for foreign medical services

Abstract

Purpose – The present study aims to use the qualitative approach of soft laddering to gather insight into both risk perception and subsequent marketing strategies of medical tourism. Medical tourism has recently started to spark interest of marketing researchers and has been a frequently discussed topic by both journalists and physicians. Nevertheless, there are only few marketing studies offering in-depth research on the phenomenon of medical tourism. In the present article, we will concentrate on the central notion of risk inherent to any medical procedure and a fortiori to surgery in the so-called Third World countries. Because medical tourism is a product to be sold to costumers, the perceived risk needs to be dealt with on the marketing level. Design/methodology/approach – In the present study, the qualitative approach of soft laddering was used with 23 participants from France and 22 participants from Quebec to gather insight into both risk perception and subsequent marketing strategies of medical tourism. Findings – The results show significant differences in consumer behavior between the two nationalities involved. We will see how these differences are related to underlying values as well as different reasons and constraints to purchase. Practical implications – The results could help developed countries’ government to implement health policy. Originality/value – Qualitative research does not often use soft laddering, which was used in this paper. Moreover, this qualitative approach has some advantages as the number of chains, as well as the frequencies of selection and the diversity of elements quoted by consumers (kinds of risks, values and consequences of the choices made).

The Theory of Planned Behaviour in Medical Tourism: International Comparison in the Young Consumer Segment

“…The last 20 years have witnessed a considerable increase in the number of people going abroad to undergo medical procedures [35], followed by increased attention from researchers [50]. Because of its dynamics and magnitude, the phenomenon has not been thoroughly studied so far [43,45,[51][52][53][54][55][56][57]. Moreover, the vast majority of the analyses have concentrated on consumers in the United States of America, without studying the situation in Europe [51].…”

“…Moreover, the vast majority of the analyses have concentrated on consumers in the United States of America, without studying the situation in Europe [51]. An asymmetry can also be seen in the analyses of supply and demand in medical tourism, as less research has been dedicated to the demand aspect of the phenomenon, that is, the perspectives of actual and potential medical tourists [3,36,47,52,[56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66]. In particular, there is little primary research into the phenomenon [34,43].…”

Means-End Chain theory: a critical review of literature

“…Another area of interest with a representative number of articles is travelling and tourism. There is a notable tendency in moving from pure travel-related topics, such as the search for/evaluation of travel destinations (Klenosky, 2002;Naoi, Airey, Iijima, and Niininen, 2006;Pike, 2012;Watkins and Gnoth, 2011) and car-sharing (Wilhelms, Henkel, and Falk, 2017;Schaefers, 2013) to health and medication related issues (Boga and Weiermair, 2011;Menvielle, Menvielle, and Tournois, 2014).…”

Volunteer choice of nonprofit organisation: an integrated framework

“…The technique selected for uncovering those attributes, consequences, and values was direct elicitation (Manyiwa and Crawford, 2002; Bech-Larsen and Nielsen, 1999) combined with soft laddering (Menvielle et al , 2014). The research considered the limitations of both the MEC laddering method and the choice of soft laddering as a technique.…”